The history of bike lanes, particularly in North America, has been of people who don’t ride claiming that they would if they had a separate lane. The lanes are implemented by road departments that have no idea what is really needed, and hope the idea will go away. The result has been low usage, and statistically terrible safety. Expert cyclists, seeing no hope of getting a proper bikeway, just advise people to acquire the skill to ride in traffic, which can easily become as safe as driving.

I can make an educated guess as to what the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is thinking… “More lanes for more cars so we can build more lanes so we can have more cars so …” on and on ad infinitum.
Anything that involves such unprofitable activities as getting healthy, helping the environment, and reducing the use of fossil fuel is completely unfathomable to such organizations.

Bob Stuart, you are absolutely right. Road departments often have no idea what they’re doing, and thus the results are dismal. And yes, when you give up on seperate infrastructure and settle for vehicular cycling, you are indeed left with only “expert cyclists” ( i.e. less than 3% of the population) who will cycle.

The problem is that, given the circumstances we find ourselves in (air polution, peak oil, obesity epidemic, rising healthcare cost, gridlocked traffic, etc.), what we really want is “mass cycling”, a system in which everyone who wants to, gets to cycle. Mass cycling can not happen when vehicular cycling is the norm. In the last 60 years this has been attempted in thousands of places around the world and it has managed to fail dismally in **every single one** of them. In fact, there’s only a handful of places in the western world where mass cycling has been achieved, and they all have one thing in common: segregation.

So, you have a choice to make: Give up on segregated infrastructure and accept the fact that cycling modal share is never going to exceed low single digits, or reject the crappy excuses for bikepaths and demand *good* infrastructure. I would suggest the latter course of action, and here’s why:
1. It’s the only thing that’s going to bring us mass cycling (with all those great benefits). There is no real alternative.
2. It’s not a long shot. Segregated cycling (if done even remotely seriously) has a 100% succes rate. It has worked whereever it was attempted, and it’s succes has been directly proportional to the quality of the infrastructure and planning.
3. It’s not difficult to do. Everything you need to know to make segregated cycling work has already been researched, tested, codified, etc. There’s is a huge body of knowledge and methodoligy readily available. In fact, it’s available online:http://www.fietsberaad.nl/index.cfm?lang=en
4. It’s cheap. The cost are only a fraction of what infrastructure for cars cost, and it’s less space consuming and more efficient.